6 Simple Practices that Will Turn Your Sales Team into Pros

Here are just a few simple, but proven, methods you can implement into your daily sales routine today that have the potential to completely redefine your expectations. How do we know they work? All six of these principles were put into our agency’s practice in September of 2011. This graph (of our monthly gross income points out just what a drastic amount of growth took place from there.

1. Measure on Statistics – And measure them weekly. Comparing stats on numbers that refer to outflow and successful deals does wonders for personal validity while keeping the team energized on a constant basis. It’s pretty straightforward. Each sales rep has their own chart that is refreshed each week that they use to push themselves to a higher level, giving them an incentive to increase productivity, as well as a tangible tool for them to digest.

Having an actual statistic line graph has a funny effect on the sales team because sales is so much like a sport – the team tends to become ultra competitive. Everyone can see each other’s’ graph on the wall and they all want to be the highest. From a management perspective, it allows you to easily see week to week how you’re doing and what to push if you are doing well or what to correct if you aren’t.

The results? Once our sales team started putting their stats up for all to see, we began seeing week over week improvement in their outflow, which inevitably led to increased deals and growth. They were taking it upon themselves to make sure they were reaching a specific goal each week, and it showed.

2. Have them Study Daily– And hold them accountable to it. As quoted from Grant Cardone, “the average CEO is said to read 60+ books a year and makes 319x the income of the average worker who reads 1 book a year but finds the time to watch 700 YouTube videos a year.” How essential, then, is making sure your sales team has new ideas they can apply each day to their sales lineup? It’s tempting to assume that our stellar sales reps know everything they can already and don’t need to keep refreshing their knowledge on their craft. The truth is, however, that this is essential to making sure your team is anything but lethargic.

What does a good study program look like? A pretty good method is to have your team study sales-related books for 45 minutes to an hour first thing each morning, allowing at least one sales book to completed each week depending on book size. If that’s pushing it, you can at least strive for a weekly time allotted to study.

3. Use A Flow Chart – Every sales team should have an exact sequence for how their sales process works, and a flow chart clearly communicates this in an easy-to-remember way. Post this chart on your wall. Your reps can then use it as a reference to make sure that their sales call is flowing correctly and will lead to that close they are looking for. Most sales tips and books are about techniques rather than process, but the two are equally important. Once you define that sequence that your reps are using, the sales cycle becomes a lot more scientific, rather than relying on an allegedly perfect technique or pitch.

Once our sales team began to take calls with a flow chart in their office, we saw them using it as a reference more and more, being able to think faster on their feet and stay focused. As a result, they started closing more deals by just sticking to the process.

4. Drill Them – Get your sales reps to practice what they preach! Frequently drilling reps on mock sales and prospect scenarios helps you correct what they may be doing wrong, point out what should be continued, and overall clean up their pitch to make sure they sound confident throughout their delivery. In our agency, we have found that 9 times out of 10, under-performing sales reps don’t need to be fired. They just need to be trained into the performers you want them to be.

This is also another way to make sure your team is thinking faster on their feet. Once we started testing our own sales team to see how speedy their delivery was, we noticed that their responses over the phone lines were tightening up as well, proving that practice was making them perfect.

5. Motivate through Games – This is a fantastic way to energize your team and reward them at the same time. Our agency has found that the sales team performs a lot better when there’s a game in place. It’s not really the money motivation but rather the playing of a game that gets them going. For example, we launched a game we called the Epic Award and set a very specific target for sales to hit over a 60-day period. The award included a beautiful Epic Award plaque and a Breitling watch. At the end of the game, we hit the highest gross income numbers for our company for that period, even though it had a holiday…Thanksgiving.

6. Consolidate Your Training Methods– Getting a new sales rep up-to-speed on your company’s unique sales style can be a huge expenditure when it comes to time and money lost for that time. That’s why training packs are fantastic ways to educate new reps on what their new job will entail. These packs can contain a wide variety of content such as: successful actions for the sales post, how to sell what your company does, flow charts, practice drills, case studies, and a checklist for the order of what to study step-by-step.

A good training pack takes at least a week for a new sales rep to complete, and at the end, they then have a few books to read and practical drills to do prior to getting started on the team. This will save management a ton of time and allows you to figure out what potential struggles a sales rep may have prior to them actually making real calls.